My Moms

Mom is gonna kill me for puttin this out there like this, but I'm posting a portion of an email she sent to me and my sis Lyd.

I live here and Lyd lives in the Bronx, so sometimes we get double-team emails from Mom. And they are almost certainly Classic of the Classics each time. I'll give you a little background first, then hit u with the portion of the email, then provide a quick character analysis of why she does and says the things she does and says.

Background: Me and The Fam, including my cousins and some aunts and uncles are about two weeks away from our Family Cruise to the Carribean, one in which my cousin Mel-Mel initially inquired "OK, I'm down, but how much are we talkin'...C-notes-wise?"

Anyways, Mom is past excited, so she hits me and Lyd with periodic messages relating her excitement. This past email was downright giddy and contained the graf below and that embodied everything she's about. It was entitled "I Can't stand the excitement....:)" Enjoy this exert:

I've already started pulling out my stuff, got my list done with my outfits & accessories... now it's all about washing (freshen stuff up) and packing... "good googala boogala" (old school slang)..... :) Dad's getting excited too.... but who knows what kinda clothes he'll bring in his 'plastic grocery bags'... hee hee... I'm just trying to get a sideways shout out for my new Louis Vitton carry on luggage... sweet. ..

I read this in the morning and sprayed coffee on my laptop screen. Let me tell you why this was so Linda J.

First off, I was tellin Lyd a few weeks back that as we get older are parents become more like children, until, one day, they're 70 and you're actually takin care of them. I call it the Relay-Reverse, the child-parent relationship slowly and grdually reversing. In our case -- parent 51 -- the process has begun with two things: hurt feelings and giddiness. Hurt feelings like my Pops once saying to my lil bro A-Eazy, "You hurt me Adam...you really hurt me." This after Adam asked pops if he put syrup in the sauce for the honey-barbecue chicken. It was totally extra and emotional and in a way, childish. Pops was right...he does all the cookin in the crib back in Buff and people rarely compliment him unless its critique, but back when he was avibrant 35 or even 45, he'd have told A to shut up or respond with somethin like, "Naw that ain't honey, you lil jive nigga. that's all that tooth decay you tastin on your bent up choppers"

Moms favorite thing is to be real extra with her excitement. The lead sentence of her email included, "do you have the crazy butterflies in the stomach?" And I know where she's comin from, believe me. I feel her...but it's kinda like how I used to get the weeks leading up to a trip to the amusement park. But you gotta love Mom for that. And the fact is, my parents are working-class, straight up-n-down, Mom-n-Dad parents. They aint takin no trips around the world and livin this glorious "all-my-children-are-adults" lifestyle. The bulk of their adulthood was spent caring and providing for us and now they're trying to do what they gotta do to get out of that financial hole between now and retirement. They are the most noble of parents...but theyre also like kids, especially Moms, in that when they do go somewhere or do something exciting, because it doesn't happen all the time, it's like the world is a big disco ball. My mother will email me and Lyd itineraries for when we come home to Buffalo and it'll be like, a month in advance.
And check the amil excert...Mom is already packing...sort of like how I used to arrange the clothes on my bed for the first week of school and it'd be like, two weeks away.

Back to the email excet, though..."good-googla-boogla"? Mom has been sayin that since, like, 1987. She tried, in her constant efforts to be hip, to say that the phrase is "old-school slang", but we know its not. ve never heard anyone else, besides Mom, spit that phrase, unless one of us were mocking her. But I love all of her random slang-terms. And there always phrases used to express either excitement or exasperation. Phrases like: good-googla-boogla, shee-gads, shoots-yea, u get the pic.

But perhaps the most telling aspect of that excert is that I can guaranee you that it was all a ploy to let us know that she just kopped some LV luggage. I was talkin to my lil sis P the other day and we were laughin at how I shamelessly trumpet my accomplishments and find backroad, convuluted ways to do so...such as, bringing up a conversation topic that, 10 minutes down the road, will end up shining the spotlight on something I did that I appreciated. So I told (half-jokingly, half-serious), "You can't blame me...I'm your mother and your father's son." And its true, I get it from them, but especially Mom.

And notice how she straight clowned Pops luggage-situation (and she was tellin the truth...homeboy travels in plastic bags, its shamless), but she clowned Pops to set up a situation where her luggae seemed even doper. It was like pointing at fat person and remarking about their appearance and then saying somethin like, "Can you tell I lost 30 pounds."

And she knew what she was doing, because she prefaced her Louis plug by admitting she was trying to get in a "sideways shout". Please let that phrase marinate...a sideways-shout? I was spent after that one.

But this is part of what this blog is for, giving you a peek at my crazy parents to give you a better idea of why I'm so brilliant, yet so very flawed.

Being imperfect...if you play it right, it can be loads of fun.

BTW: If you think I'm not gonna have a novel-blog ready after the Fam Cruise, then you don't know Twist very well at all.